Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL)

India's System of Medicine and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) Initiative - For thousands of years, India has possessed a rich traditional knowledge of ways and means practiced to treat diseases afflicting people. This knowledge has generally been passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. Documentation of this existing knowledge, available in public domain, on various traditional systems of medicine has become imperative to safeguard the sovereignty of this traditional knowledge and to protect it from being misappropriated in the form of patents on non-original innovations by drug companies. It has been observed that in the past years patents have been wrongly granted to companies for products based on long known traditional knowledge. This has led to the development of the online Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) over this past decade . TKDL is a database with a tool to understand the codified knowledge existing for the Indian Systems of Medicine including Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani and Yoga as prior practiced art. It is not a diagnostic or usage database. An inter-disciplinary team of Traditional Medicine (Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga) experts, patent examiners, IT experts, scientists and technical officers are involved in creation of TKDL.  See http://www.tkdl.res.in/tkdl/langdefault/common/Home.asp?GL=Eng